RE: Legality of unlawful data on blockchain?

Pretending that I’m a lawyer in real life (just for pretendsies), your lawyer is giving you sound advice, if also on the more cautious side of risk aversion.

Within common-law jurisdictions, the issue that @dirge brings up about a lack of precedent, is actually something that works AGAINST you and your risk of liability (criminal and civil) rather than in your favor.

This is because, as common law jurisdictions go, when there is no law touching on a particular issue directly such that there is a binding statute or binding case-law precedent, and a party brings a cause of action against the alleged person who caused harm, they will attempt to make that cause of action (i.e. lawsuit) “sound” under an already existing parallel theory of law and try to build up a case based upon persuasive authorities with fact patterns that are conceptually similar.

And then, it’s a matter of whether or not the particular trial judge and jury (at the trial level and then the numerous Judges at the various levels of appeals) determine that the legal theories put forth based on those persuasive authorities is strong enough to extend the law out to the blockchain by the type of legal analogy utilized for nee situations like this.

Which means, practically speaking, it’s a crapshoot. You can’t readily predict how this will go, and that means the risk is always there, especially if you consider that common law judges don’t always extend laws in “common-sense” ways (ask American first amendment lawyers about privacy law being rooted in the “penumbras formed by emanations” from the Bill of Rights if you want to get an idea about how law can spin-off into abstract ideas that no one could have ever predicted from a more textually-grounded interpretation...leaving aside critical theory, reader response stuff for a second).

tl;dr: There’s not enough precedent on the issue, which means there’s no way to predict in common-law jurisdictions how the law or courts will go. This means your risk, generally, sits at around 50/50. Your lawyer is giving you sound advice.